Facebook Insights Provides Data to Analyze Your Business Page

Insights helps you understand how your Facebook page is performing and shows you which types of posts works for your audience. Insights is also the best interface for understand the demographic that has gathered around your page. All of these things are important if you are seriously using Facebook for your business.

There have been a couple of re-designs to this interface in the last year. The latest version ties into the new business page Timeline design.

Public viewing of your Insights

What used to be hidden, is now in plain view. On all Facebook business Pages, one of the app boxes is called Likes. Anyone visiting your Page can click that box and see a snapshot of your Page’s analytics.

And also under the name of your Page is a small line of numbers in a medium grey font color with two or three numbers; the total number of people who have Liked the page, the number of people talking about this page, and if your business is a Places page (has a local address) the total number of times people have checked-in.

Viewing your Page’s Insights

How do you get to your Insights? Facebook has created this Admin panel for all Pages, and that is the easiest place to get to your Insights. When you are on your Page, your Admin panel might be opened automatically. If not, click the button in the top right corner that says, Admin Panel. Once opened, look for the See All link above the Insights box.

Once you click the See All link, the interface will start to look familiar, if you used it before the Timeline re-design went into effect. You have several tabs at the top; Overview, Likes, Reach, and Talking About This.

Overview tab

The Overview gives you a snapshot of the data for the last month. The line of numbers at the top are; Total Likes, Friends of Fans, People Talking About This, and Weekly total Reach. The handy arrows tell you if you are continuing to engage your audience or if the attention is waning.

The next section down on the Overview tab is called Page Posts and contains a dynamic table where you can sort the information by column. So, for example, you can sort the table by number of Engaged Users to see the posts that had the most.

Likes tab

Clicking the Likes tab opens another page with information about your Page’s demographics and where your Likes came from. This tab also shows you how many have Unliked your Page — a valuable number to analyze. You can view the data with a custom date range, but the range can be no longer than 89 days. It defaults to a range of the past 30 days.

Reach tab

Clicking the Reach tab will show you the actual reach of your page. This particular tab has some very important information on it:

Gender and Age: Check out the percentage of people who saw your content in each age bracket.

Countries, Cities, Languages: The reach number is going to be much higher than the number of Page Likes, because of the ability of Friends of your fans seeing the content. For example, your page might have 10,000 page Likes, but a reach of 505,000 people in the United States.

How You Reached People: There are two charts in this section: one for all the different types of Reach — organic, paid, viral, and total — and another graph for how many times people saw your content.

Visits to your Page: You’ll find page views total and by unique visitors.

Total Tab Views: This list of numbers shows you what people thought were worth clicking on — so your Timeline number will probably be the highest number and after that you can see which apps are the most interesting to people. You might find your Contact tab getting the second highest number! That a great sign!

External Referrers: You can see from this list if your new visitors are coming from a Google search or from a blog post where you were mentioned, or from any number of places online.

Talking About This tab

Clicking the Talking About This tab opens another rich interface with information about the most engaged people connected to your page. Remember, Facebook calls all the different kinds of posts — Stories. The bottom graph on this tab lets you see the different kinds of Stories that have produced engagement by clicking the dropdown button called All Stories. You can click through the five different types (Page Likes, Stories from Your Posts, Mentions and Photos Tags, Posts by Others and Questions) and see the corresponding numbers on the graph change.

Helpful links and resources with Insight

When on the Insights interface, look for the gear icon in the top right corner of the page. When you click it, you can find quick links to Facebook’s own Insights Guide and a link to Take the Tour. Both are very helpful in teaching you the particular vocabulary Facebook uses and what all the numbers mean. Some of the screenshots in their own guide are of the old design (even Facebook has to update its documents), but the descriptions and marketing advice are still valid.